Claude Ambroise Seurat, 'The Living Skeleton'

This stipple engraving by George Cruikshank depicts Claude Ambroise Seurat (born Champagne, 10 April 1798), a Frenchman exhibited across Europe as a medical curiosity weighing only 77 lbs. Cruikshank renders him frontally, flesh dissolved to reveal ribs, pelvis, and knee joints with near-anatomical clarity — the showman's spectacle dressed in scientific illustration's clothing. Published by John Williams, 13 Paternoster Row, it served both popular curiosity and the profitable freak-exhibition trade. Cruikshank, Isaac's son and Gillray's heir, here steps from political caricature into documentary grotesque — the same vocabulary of exaggerated physical form that runs from Hogarth's moral series through Rowlandson's social satires directly into the sequential visual storytelling that would become the comic strip.